Minor bug: I equipped Victor with the cooking pot trinket during an emperor's challenge run that was looking for tactician team. Cooking pot gives you one tactician level. When we ran out of the necessary supplies, the tactician level of the team went down as expected. But when we finished the mission and went back to the world screen, it did not go back up despite supplies being replenished. I feel like the cooking pot should do a check every time you return to the world screen.

Yes Ivan card isn't supposed to (and doesn't) change his ability to a full Excite, what it does is it adds 20% accuracy to his normal try-to-excite ability making it 100% accurate most of the time. This extra accuracy and the extra speech from his armor makes Ivan a strong Friendly explorer in friendly encounters. The reason he doesn't get a full friendly ability is likely to limit how much speech power Ivan can effectively use during encounters, if he got a full friendly ability he would likely completely outcompete any of the other strong speech characters.

As for the Cooking pot, did you move it around a little after getting back on the overworld? Unequiping and re-equipping usually does the trick in cases like these, though I agree it would be more convenient if we didn't have to do that.

Ok, the main bug with the porcelain points happened again and I still don't 100% know what's happening but I do still think it might be due to values not being properly saved. As I recall.
I had some amount of points in the 60's when I went back to the overworld.
I then accepted the emperor's challenge to stay away from 3-star expeditions and below and at this point I had a number that was either 64 or 66.
Then I reached 1000 renown which I distinctly remember was worth 2 points.
My score then became 64, which is definitely lower than 2 + 64 or 2 + 66.

I'm just going to take a guess, I have no idea how your code looks but could it be that in the background you update the new value of porcelain points from the old but don't finalize it so it's possible to skip an update if it gets incremented twice. So if we say I initially had 60 points, the emperor's challenge to stay out of 3-star places was 4 points, and the 1000 renown was 2 points, could the math go like:
1. first update: 60 + 4 = 64
2. update UI
3. second update: 60 + 2 = 62
4. update UI, finalize most-recent update

I should really start jotting down my points. I would be so much more confident in this theory if I remembered the numbers exactly.

Wait a second... this bug just got weirder. When I reload my game the value is now 70, which is probably right one way or another. So... so it looks like this is just a UI bug. Ok, I promise to actually write down values going forward.

Ok, I think I found an instance that perfectly illustrates what's wrong here. The good news is it's not nearly as bad as I initially thought. Rutger said all the math was done in the background and only the UI update could lag, and I think this agrees with it. It definitely shows something strange happening in the UI.

Alright, so, in the overworld:
1. Start out with 32 points.
2. Get a trophy worth 4.
3. Score got updated to 40.
4. Get another trophy worth 4.
5. Let's take a note of the animation here. The 4 floats up to the 40, and the sum becomes 36.
6. Reloading the game, 40 is still displayed.

So it looks like the game figured out I had both trophies in the background, updated to 40, but then the UI messed up.

I'll stop posting updates on this since I think this captures the bug. I can answer any questions if they come up. Otherwise... still trying to get that 25 unique challenges achievement!

Just curious, is there anything wrong with the Challenge Hunter achievement on Steam? I saw I had done 10 challenges two months ago and started trying to get to 25. And I even wrote down which ones I had done. I'm not up to at least 24 by my count. Yesterday I looked and the steam counter had advanced too, but only to 14. I see some notes on Steam about disabling the cloud to get the achievement. I also remember seeing somewhere that the counter might just be buggy but will report when you hit 25.

The counter is definitely buggy. I'm not exactly sure where the problem is located exactly. We have definitely also had reports from people's challenges not registering (and thus them having to do more than 25 challenges). Some people have suggested that it might have to do with skipping the win animation at the end, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.